You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

Let's welcome Drew House of the Stanford.

Thank you.

All right.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Good.

So it's really a pleasure to be here.

And surreal for me in a couple of different ways, but a big turning point on kind of my whole entrepreneurial adventure was actually about five years ago, maybe six years ago.

There's this thing called Startup School, which is held in an auditorium not too far from here.

So it's been a pretty crazy journey since then that I hope to tell you guys

a little bit out. And so what I want to talk about is first and foremost, a little bit of the

Dropbox story, especially the early days and how we got started. And maybe thread through there

some of the lessons we can draw from that.

And, you know, when I was embarking on this journey, it was actually, you know, I graduated with my undergrad degree in computer science about six years ago.

So it hasn't been that long, but it would be awesome if like someone sat me down and told me what the journey would be like. So I'm trying to think of this and kind of those terms.

What do I wish someone had told me when I was, you know, 21, 22,

just getting started because it was a pretty kind of, you know,

what you sort of, what I was thinking about the whole startup world was kind of,

like climbing Mount Doom, right? You sort of, you don't know how

tall it is, but there's a lot of fire and things exploding all around you and a lot of smoke and it's

really steep and, you know, even if you know where you're going right now, things are going to get

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